第4章 马槽歌

Away in a Manger

Christmas was in the air, and Miss Butler had us girls making gifts in Home Ec. class. We ought to have been learning invisible mending and turning hems to make our clothes last. But Miss Butler decreed hot pads for our loved ones, made by crocheting used bottle caps into circular patterns.

Ina-Rae was my crocheting partner, and she was all thumbs with a crochet hook. Her hot pad bunched up in the middle like a skullcap. She wore it on her head until Miss Butler told her to take it off. I couldn’t picture giving Grandma a hot pad made out of bottle caps crocheted together, so I let Ina-Rae have mine for her mother. I hadn’t thought about giving Grandma anything. Somehow I didn’t think Grandma and Christmas went together.

I was lucky to have Ina-Rae though. Carleen Lovejoy was still looking straight through me, and she set the tone for the rest of the girls. I hadn’t made a lot of headway in all these weeks. Ina-Rae heard Gertrude Messerschmidt tell Mona Veech that I wasn’t as pushy as they thought I’d be. But that was as far as I’d got.

If there was one point in my favor, it was that I wasn’t as well dressed as they’d feared. I had two wool skirts. One had been Mother’s. The other belonged mostly to the moths. With my three sweaters, I could get through the week. But I was hurting for shoes, and my winter coat was a disgrace.

Carleen had five different outfits top to toe for every day in the week. She always wore silk stockings on Fridays, though some of her shoes may have been her mother’s. Her sweater with drawstring neckline and pom-poms was much admired. But as Carleen said in her airy way, considering the boys in our school, there wasn’t much point in looking your best.

But now Christmas was coming, and the annual school Christmas program, so we all had to pull together. The entire student body was to be the chorus, though half of us couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles. When Miss Butler ran us through “Angels We Have Heard on High,” we sounded like starlings in a tree.

There was to be a Nativity scene, and she assigned us parts. Joseph, the three kings, and some shepherds just about exhausted the supply of boys. Nobody wanted Augie Fluke on the stage. His hair was growing out, but he looked like a plucked chicken.

The girls’ parts were for Baby Jesus’ Mother and a heavenly host of angels. The idea that a boy could be an angel never occurred to Miss Butler.

The school was rocked by the news that I was to play Baby Jesus’ Mother. I was surprised myself. Someone was heard to remark, “What was Miss Butler dreaming of? A Chicago girl playing the Virgin Mary. The idea!” It was Carleen. As we had to come up with our own costumes, I thought I could get by with bedsheets.

The program was all the Christmas some of us would have. Money was tighter than last year. The two topics on everybody’s mind there at the end of 1937 were something to eat and money. Not that I ever went hungry at Grandma’s. But there was hunger around. And with Grandma, money remained a mystery.

I made my way home from school one early December day, scooping snow with my open-toed shoes. Strangely, Grandma wasn’t home. Just at dusk when I was up in my room, still wearing my old plaid coat, something drew me to the window.

Coming up the road by the Wabash tracks was a fearful figure. A lumbering, humped shape bent into the swirling snow. Its head was swathed in something. Strapped to its back was a long wicker basket. Its boots left black footprints behind. I hugged my skimpy coat tight and felt the empty house around me. The figure was at our fence line when it looked up at my window, and me.

It was Grandma.

I was down in the kitchen as she came in, shaggy with snow. She slung the big basket aside. Then she untred the shawl that held her hat on. She flung Grand Dowdel’s old coat at a chair before the fire.

Underneath, she was wearing Grandpa’s rubber chest-waders that were like rubber bib overalls. They strained across her bosom and pulled at the shoulder straps. She was all in black rubber almost up to her chins.

Of all the figures she ever cut, this one took the cake. I often wondered what she’d buried Grandpa Dowdel in. She seemed to wear every stitch he’d owned.

“Chilly out there.” She rubbed her big red hands together. “My teeth is chattering like a woodpecker with palsy.”

“Grandma, why were you out tramping the countryside in this weather?”

“First snow,” she explained. “It’s my busy season. It’s all work, work, work. I’ll die standing up like an old ox.”

What good would it do me to question her more? I peered into the tall wicker basket. It was half full of shells—walnut hulls. They didn’t tell me a thing.

I’ll omit the scene of Grandma fighting her way out of all that rubber, beside the heat of the stove. It was like shedding a skin. Below it, she wore two crumpled housedresses and a cardigan sweater. Under that, a quick peek of long-handled flannel underwear—a union suit, Grandpa’s.

At the supper table I mentioned that Miss Butler had picked the parts for the Christmas program. I confided that I was Baby Jesus’ Mother.

“They still doing Nativity scenes?” Grandma said. “We done them when I was a country girl in a one-room schoolhouse. ”

“What part did they give you?”

“Joseph,” she said. “And once, a camel. I was always the biggest.”

After I’d dried the dishes, I opened up my homework. They had homework down here too, sadly. Miss Butler could really dole it out. Mr. Herkimer was no slouch. Grandma sat at the other end of the table, nodding, while I tried to diagram some sentences.

I moved on to biology, falling into the rhythm of Grandma’s snore. A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.

“Is that the time?” She pointed down the table at me. “You better get booted and bundled up.” She was not of the chair, shaking down the stove. Now she reached for her hat and the shawl and felt Grandpa’s coat to see if it was dry.

I clutched my forehead. “Grandma, it’s the dead of night.”

“But a moonlit night.” She shimmied into her chest-waders and stuffed her skirttails inside.

“Grandma, it’s a school night. I need my sleep.”

“Sleep? You’ll sleep your life away and rot in the bed. You better pull on two pair of socks under your galoshes.”

I had galoshes, but hated wearing them. “Grandma, where are we going?”

“After a character who’s smarter than we are,” she said, struggling into the coat, clenching her jaw.

When I came back to the kitchen, layered like Admiral Byrd, Grandma was rummaging through the mysterious wicker basket. She took inventory of various things buried in the walnut hulls. A coil of her picture wire. A handful of wooden stakes. She drew forth a small glass vial of some amber liquid. With a sly look my way, she uncorked it and passed it under my nose.

I reeled back. “Grandma, that smells nasty.”

“Depends on who’s doing the smelling.” She rummaged on, coming up with what looked like a rabbit’s foot. It was something furry off a rabbit.

“What’s that for, Grandma? Good luck?”

“You might say so.”

She stood to hoist the basket onto her shoulder. Then she remembered and made for a knife drawer in the Hoosier cabinet. Out of the drawer she drew a gun.

I froze.

It was nothing like the blunderbuss behind the woodbox. It was, in fact, a single-shot .22 pistol. But I didn’t know that then. There was a lot I didn’t know. Slipping the pistol into her pocket, she marched us both out the door, into the night.

We trod the icy ridges of the road, and the town fell back behind us. A cold, cloudless moon glared on white fields. I walked in Grandma’s shadow, hearing the basket thump her back and the walnut hulls dance to her step. Of course, I should be sound asleep in bed by now, and I couldn’t feel my toes. And Grandma was packing a pistol. But it was beautiful out here, like a black and white Christmas card. The ice on the wovenwire fences was a latticework of diamonds. And only Grandma and I were awake in all this stillness, at least I hoped so.

We must have walked halfway to Cowgills’ farm before she nudged me off the road. We jammed a gate against a drift and entered someone’s field. The snow was deeper here. Grandma led the way as we kept to the fences to the far corner of the field.

She put up a hand to hold me back. She wore railroaders’ gloves. Then I heard the scream. A scream too human, from down in the dipping corner of the field that the moon missed. An answering scream froze in my throat.

Grandma shrugged out of the basket and whipped the pistol from her pocket. A moonbeam glanced the black metal of the narrow barrel as she aimed into the dark corner where two fences met. She fired straight into the scream. My knees begged to buckle.

She was down on all fours now, the black coat fanning out in the snow, her hands busy. She worked intently, biting off one glove to use her bare hand to do whatever she was doing. She tugged at a wire, and powdery snow shook loose off a fence post. Metal clicked. Then she pulled back and held him up, by the neck.

It was a fox—red, though black in the moonlight. His head lolled against her fist. His eyes were black beads. But he was dead, drilled through the head to put him out of his misery. A slender stem seemed to connect his hanging mouth to the snow. But that was a thin trickle of blood. I fought the supper in my throat.

Grandma dropped the fox in the snow and reached for the jawed spring trap that had caught it—a Victor #2, as I would come to know. She pulled herself to her feet to toss the trap into the basket. The walnut hulls were to disguise a human scent. So were the rubber chest-waders. Oh, I had lots to learn, once I was over the first shock.

Replacing her glove, she plunged her whole arm into the basket and came up with another trap. She fished for the tuft of rabbit fur and the vial of amber liquid and the picture wire.

Then she was down in the snow again, gasping with the work and the cold. Steam rose off her. She wired a trap to a fence post. She stuck the little flag of rabbit fur in the workings of the trap and drew the cork from the vial with her teeth. She’d driven the wooden stake. Now she poured a little of the fluid on it.

“Grandma, what is that stuff?”

“Fox urine,” she said, and set the jaws of the trap.

Once more she dragged herself upright. We moved on along the fence. She gave me the trapping basket to carry, making me part of this. She swung the fox by his brush tail, after she’d reloaded the pistol.

“He’s smart,” Grandma said, mostly to herself but teaching me. “Wily. He can smell me, and I can’t smell him. But there’s some fox in me, and I know how he thinks. He likes fence lines and standing water and ditches. And I need the snow to track him.”

We came to two more of her traps. I guess I was relieved to see them empty. Then on across another pasture a trap yielded a fox already dead. Though Grandma was quick on the trigger, I think she was glad of that. I was. She tied her two foxes together with twine from her pocket. She was never without twine.

We followed a fresh track of prints to the edge of a frozen drainage ditch where she set another trap. How quick and sure she worked with those stiff old hands of hers.

I was cold right through. We worked back to the road by a meandering route, leaving our own tracks behind. Now she had four foxes twined together. When she held them up, you could see how they’d be—fox furs with glass eyes, arranged around some lady’s shoulders, far from here.

The next day Grandma skinned the foxes and nailed their pelts to the cobhouse wall. And when the fur broker came around, they did a deal. He tried his best, telling her he was mainly in the market for muskrat and beaver. But she was better with foxes, and at driving a bargain. She sold every last skin at her price. This began to clear up the mystery of where Grandma got such ready money as she had.

I went out with her many a December night when the snow was on the ground. Something drew me away from the warm stove. I dreaded the scream of a trapped fox. But I’d have heard it anyway, in my head, at home. So I’d go out with Grandma to work her traps in the ebony and silver nights. There were little changes stirring in me. I began to notice how old Grandma was, how hard she worked herself, how far from town she’d roam in the frozen nights, across uneven ground. I began to want to be there with her, to make sure she’d come safely home.

At school we practiced for the Christmas program all month long. Miss Butler couldn’t sing either, but she was a feisty director. After we’d run “Lo, How a Rose” into the ground, she took it off the program. And she wasn’t satisfied with our “Once in Royal David’s City.” She took the Christmas program personally, as teachers do.

We had our stage props now: a radiating tinfoil star and one of those mangers you see in Nativity scenes and nowhere else. Baby Jesus was a battered doll with eyes that opened and closed. It was Ina-Rae’s. She said she’d had it when she was little, but the rumor was that she still played with it.

I had a sheet shawl and drapings. Carleen Lovejoy looked straight out of Hollywood in her satin gown and wings as head angel. But other people whined that they weren’t nearly set for the big night. In a rehearsal both Johnson boys went bone-white and fainted. They had bad cases of stage fright, though they were only shepherds.

Grandma naturally took no interest, even when I complained to her about Carleen Lovejoy’s halo. It was all tinsel and practically lit up. Grandma was busy. But then I wouldn’t have taken her for a Christmas kind of woman anyway.

Still, one day after school I found her poring over mail-order catalogues. She handed me the one from Sears, open to “Fashions in Footgear for the Junior Miss and the Younger Active Woman.”

“Pick you out a pair,” she said.

“Grandma, do I get a Christmas present?” I said, to test her.

“You need shoes,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll be binding your feet in rags to get through the winter, like Valley Forge.”

I considered every pair on every page, trying them on in my mind. A lot rode on my decision. These shoes had to go everywhere I went. And there’d be room in the toes, which made my heart sing.

Grandma had long grown restless when I finally made my choice. They had to be practical, with a closed toe. And still being fifteen, I wanted something a little older, with a Cuban heel. I knew they’d have to lace up, or Grandma wouldn’t go for them. I checked off a pair—gunmetal gray to go with everything.

Grandma considered my choice. The toothpick hovered. “That them?” she said at last. “Whoooeee, two dollars and seventy-five cents.” Her eyes filled her spectacles. “I remember when you could shoe a whole family and the horse for that money.”

But then we drew paper patterns around my feet to send back for the right size. She filled out the order form with the toothpick aslant in the corner of her mouth. She stamped the return envelope. That’s the only time I ever saw her use a stamp.

Later, I caught her studying the catalogue from Lane Bryant: “Winter and Spring of 1938 Modes for the Fuller-Figured Woman.” But I stole away without a word.

The days slipped faster off the December calendar. Tension mounted at school, and both Johnson brothers were often absent. Carleen Lovejoy preened in advance. Clearly she thought that her angel was going to outshine my Virgin Mary. She was going to be the Christmas program’s center of attention or know the reason why.

Something was coming over Grandma too. She was jumpier than a jackrabbit, and the short days were too long for her. One evening when it was hardly dark, she had us both out, tramping the road north. We pulled an old handmade sled of my dad’s. “Grandma, now where are we going?”